Marm Lisa - Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith

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on a bench, watching them as a dog watches its master’s coat, was a girl of some undeterminable age,—perhaps of ten or twelve years.  She wore a shapeless stout gingham garment, her shoes were many sizes too large for her, and the laces were dangling.  Her nerveless hands and long arms sprawled in her lap as if they had no volition in them.  She sat with her head slightly drooping, her knees apart, and her feet aimlessly turned in.  Her lower lip hung a little, but only a little, loosely.  She looked neither at earth nor at sky, but straight at the two belligerents, with whose bloodthirsty play she was obliged to interfere at intervals.  She held in her lap a doll made of a roll of brown paper, with a waist and a neck indicated by gingham strings.  Pieces of ravelled rope were pinned on the head part, but there was no other attempt to assist the imagination.  She raised her dull eyes; they seemed to hold in their depths a knowledge of aloofness from the happier world, and their dumb sorrow pierced your very heart, while it gave you an irresistible sense of aversion.  She smiled, but the smile only gave you a new thrill; it was vacant and had no joy in it, rather an uncommunicable grief.  As she sat there with her battered doll, she was to the superficial eye repulsive, but to the eye that pierces externals she was almost majestic in her mysterious loneliness and separation.

      The steam-whistle of a factory near by blew a long note for twelve o’clock, and she rose from her bench, took the children by the hand, and dragged them, kindly but firmly, up the steps into the kitchen.  She laid her doll under a towel, but, with a furtive look at the boy, rolled it in a cloth and tucked it under her skirt at the waist-line.  She then washed the children’s faces, tied on their calico bibs, and pushed them up to the pine table.  While they battered the board and each other with spoons and tin mugs, she went automatically to a closet, took a dish of cold porridge and turned it into three bowls, poured milk over it, spread three thick slices of wheat bread with molasses from a cup, and sat down at the table.  After the simple repast was over, she led the still reluctant (constitutionally reluctant) twins up the staircase and put them, shrieking, on a bed; left the room, locking the door behind her in a perfunctory sort of way as if it were an everyday occurrence, crouched down on the rug outside, and, leaning her head back against the wall, took her doll from under her skirt, for this was her playtime, her hour of ease.

      Poor little ‘Marm Lisa,’ as the neighbours called her!  She had all the sorrows and cares of maternity with none of its compensating joys.

      II

      MISTRESS MARY’S GARDEN

      ‘“Mistress Mary, quite contrary,

         How does your garden grow?”

      “With silver bells and cockle shells,

         And little maids all in a row.”’

      Mistress Mary’s Garden did grow remarkably well, and it was wonderfully attractive considering the fact that few persons besides herself saw anything but weeds in it.

      She did not look in the least a ‘contrary’ Miss Mary, as she stood on a certain flight of broad wooden steps on a sunshiny morning; yet she was undoubtedly having her own way and living her own life in spite of remonstrances from bevies of friends, who saw no shadow of reason or common-sense in her sort of gardening.  It would have been foolish enough for a young woman with a small living income to cultivate roses or violets or lavender, but this would at least have been poetic, while the arduous tilling of a soil where the only plants were little people ‘all in a row’ was something beyond credence.

      The truth about Mistress Mary lay somewhere in the via media between the criticisms of her sceptical friends and the encomiums of her enthusiastic admirers.  In forsaking society temporarily she had no rooted determination to forsake it eternally, and if the incense of love which her neophytes for ever burned at her shrine savoured somewhat of adoration, she disarmed jealousy by frankly avowing her unworthiness and lack of desire to wear the martyr’s crown.  Her happiness in her chosen vocation made it impossible, she argued, to regard her as a person worthy of canonisation; though the neophytes were always sighing to

                  ‘have that little head of hers

      Painted upon a background of pale gold.’

      She had been born with a capacity for helping lame dogs over stiles; accordingly, her pathway, from a very early age, had been bestrewn with stiles, and processions of lame dogs ever limping towards them.  Her vocation had called her so imperiously that disobedience was impossible.  It is all very well if a certain work asks one in a quiet and courteous manner to come and do it, when one has time and inclination; but it is quite another matter if it coaxes one so insistently that one can do nothing else properly, and so succumbs finally to the persuasive voice.  Still, the world must be mothered somehow, and there are plenty of women who lack the time or the strength, the gift or the desire, the love or the patience, to do their share.  This gap seems to be filled now and then by some inspired little creature like Mistress Mary, with enough potential maternity to mother an orphan asylum; too busy, too absorbed, too radiantly absent-minded to see a husband in any man, but claiming every child in the universe as her very own.  There was never anywhere an urchin so dirty, so ragged, so naughty, that it could not climb into Mistress Mary’s lap, and from thence into her heart.  The neophytes partook of her zeal in greater or less degree, and, forsaking all probability of lovers (though every one of them was young and pretty), they tied on their white aprons and clave only unto her.  Daily intercourse with a couple of hundred little street Arabs furnished a field for the practice of considerable feminine virtue, and in reality the woman’s kingdom at the top of the broad wooden steps was a great ‘culture engine’ of spiritual motherhood.

      It certainly was a very merry place, and if its presiding geniuses were engaged in conscious philanthropy, the blighting hallmark was conspicuous by its absence.  Peals of laughter rang through the rooms; smiling faces leaned from the upstairs windows, bowing greeting to the ashman, the scissors-grinder, the Italian and Chinese vegetable-vendors, the rag-sack-and-bottle man, and the other familiar figures of the neighbourhood.

      It was at the end of a happy, helpful day that Mistress Mary stood in the front door and looked out over her kingdom.

      There was a rosy Swedish girl sitting on the floor of a shop window opposite and washing the glass.  She had moved the fresh vegetables aside and planted herself in the midst of them.  There she sat among the cabbages and turnips and other sweet things just out of the earth; piles of delicate green lettuce buds, golden carrots bursting into feathery tops, ruddy beets, and pink-checked.  It was pretty to see the honest joy of her work and the interest of her parted lips, when, after polishing the glass, it shone as crystal clear as her own eyes.  A milkman stopping to look at her (and small wonder that he did) poured nearly a quart of cream on the ground, and two children ran squabbling under the cart to see if they could catch the drippings in their mouths.  They were Atlantic and Pacific Simonson with Marm Lisa, as usual, at their heels.  She had found her way to this corner twice of late, because things happened there marvellous enough to stir even her heavy mind.  There was a certain flight of narrow, rickety steps leading to a rickety shanty, and an adjacent piece of fence with a broad board on top.  Flower-pots had once stood there, but they were now lying on the ground below, broken into fragments.  Marm Lisa could push the twins up to this vantage-ground, and crawl up after them.  Once ensconced, if they had chosen the right time of day, interesting events were sure to be forthcoming.  In a large playground within range of vision, there were small children, as many in number as the sands of the seashore.  At a given moment, a lovely angel with black hair and a scarlet apron would ring a large bell.  Simultaneously, a lovely angel with brown hair and a white apron would fly to the spot, and the children would go through a mysterious process like the swarming of bees around a queen.  Slowly, reluctantly, painfully, the swarm settled itself into lines in conformance with some hidden law or principle unknown to Marm Lisa.  Then, when comparative order had been evolved from total chaos, the most beautiful angel of all would appear in a window; and the reason she always struck the onlookers as a being of beauty and majesty was partly, perhaps, because her head seemed to rise from a cloud of white (which was in reality only a fichu of white mull), and partly because she always wore a slender fillet of steel to keep back the waves of her fair hair.  It had a little

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